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Saturday, April 21, 2018

Versum Materials Celebrates the Grand Opening of Its R&D Facility in Hometown, PA

TEMPE, Ariz. (April 19, 2018) Versum Materials, Inc. (NYSE: VSM),
a leading materials supplier to the semiconductor industry, announced
today the grand opening of its new research and development (R&D)
facility at its semiconductor materials manufacturing site in Hometown,
Pennsylvania. The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place April 10, 2018.
Versum employees, members of the community, local government, customers
and strategic partners attended the event.

The state-of-the-art
R&D laboratory is dedicated to new materials used in the manufacture
of semiconductors. Scientists in the facility will synthesize and
purify new molecules down to parts per billion impurity levels and below
using the latest technologies available in the industry. The
researchers can assess the applications for these new molecules and
scale up the molecules to larger quantities for customer evaluation.
These new organometallic compounds will be deposited on semiconductor
wafers through cutting-edge technologies to test their performance for
semiconductor applications. Additionally, the facility is capable of
small-volume manufacturing and advanced analytical and quality
assessment.

State
Senator Dave Argall commended Versum for being the region’s third
largest employer and for the company’s investments in the local
community. Approximately 30 employees, half of which hold advanced
degrees in chemistry or chemical engineering, are based in the new
facility. The company’s Hometown campus now totals 250 highly-skilled
employees.The latest expansion is part of a
$60MM multi-year investment in the Hometown campus. Last year the
company announced it had increased production capacity and modified
equipment configuration to reduce manufacturing bottlenecking. Versum’s
Hometown manufacturing facility produces a variety of high purity
specialty gases and chemicals for semiconductor manufacturers around the
world, including Tungsten Hexafluoride, WF6 and Nitrogen Trifluoride, NF3.
WF6 is used as a metallization source for the formation of tungsten
interconnects between multiple layers in semiconductor devices. It is an
important material in the production of both logic and memory (DRAM and
NAND) devices. NF3 is primarily used for chamber cleaning of chemical
vapor deposition reactors.

Versum’s Senior Vice President of
Materials, Ed Shober addressed the attendees stating, “We enable the
largest tech companies around the world to stretch the boundaries of
science and technology, whether it be supporting computing power,
mobility, connectivity, artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented
reality, the Internet of Things, Big Data and machine learning. Versum
Materials is at the core of enabling all these technologies… Our Versum
Materials team delivers valued products and solutions that bring this
cutting-edge innovation to the market safer, faster, easier and more
reliably than ever before.”